The Return Of The Snoopers Charter

Within days of the terrible terrorist events in France, our Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May seize the opportunity to re-promote the Snoopers Charter ...

They rush like predictable, programmed Pavlov dogs to curtail everyone's freedoms, triggered by incidents such as these. They rely on people's fear of terror to push it through, strengthening the government's grip on people far beyond the bounds of decency in a democracy which ostensibly has freedom of speech and other liberties enshrined in its make up.

I have no problem with intercepts, bugging and recording of true suspects' activities online, or on mobile phones provided, of course, that there is proper judicial overview of the process.

But the Snoopers Charter (as discussed many time before) means that everyone's Internet activity, mobile phone traffic and social media interactions will be logged and all the metadata recorded and stored.

The Home Secretary limited her utterances to reviving the Charter as proposed in the past. As in the past, key critics of it - such as Nick Clegg and David Davies - have hit back. But our Prime Minister has gone much, much further. He's now talking about including the capture of content as well as metadata!

Of course the Tories have to win the next election to achieve this and the second incredible proposal that Cameron made. This one is so stupid it should cost him the election!

Completely ludicrous is the proposal to ban messaging apps that use encryption and also to weaken encryption of pretty well everything so that the government can read encrypted traffic easily.

So messaging apps such as Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Whatsapp would be banned in the UK (of course not in the rest of the world!) and other encrypted traffic be weakened and have back doors strategically located. The government - and all hackers - are just going to love that!

eCommerce will be clobbered and many British based eTailers probably pushed to the wall. What happens to online banking, which is a boon to individuals and businesses alike?Life as we know and love it today will head rapidly back to the dark ages before the Internet impacted pretty well every aspect of our lives. Instead of being a world leader in online development, we will head to a third world existence with a badly damaged economy. And we will do it alone!

The EU is going in the other direction – Angela Merkel and Germany are about to propose a strengthening of the EU privacy laws in favour of the individual and place greater restrictions on what governments can do.

We will attempt to erect a firewall around the UK to block out encrypted traffic – futile and so North Korean like. Was ever a proposal so ill thought out?!

And there are many commercial secure communication tools out there already, in use by businesses securing their communications. What will the Government do? Ban them all, drive them out of the country or send them underground?

Frankly I will head underground myself! I am not willing to compromise my security, or freedom, in the interests of a totalitarian state. A ban or weakening of encryption is probably not enforceable, but I hope we don't have to find out the hard way – the damage to us individually and to the country will be great!

Best to think about how to vote at the upcoming election. Let's see what makes the public - and not so public - manifestoes of each party!

Read the full, unabridged version at www.andrewspencer.uk.com.
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